Frostburg mining journal. [volume] (Frostburg, Md.) 1871-1913, 1887-05-21

est reasons and, amongst others, that
nobody cared much about him. He was
too just to impute this to anything but
envy and moral inferiority and required
the Stole philosophy to get along alone.
Besides, he was financially successful.
Everything he engaged in turned out
ultimately well. A few men of ideas and
enterprises rather deferred to Laban
Prim's COOL elf-balanced mental courage
and incidental judgment, and let him
into their investments, and much of his
capital was his well-regulated life.
He was moderate in everything but
hate of license and false stewardship, and
he was intolerant of opposition, because
he knew he was always right No man
differed with him on public question
and continued to be his friend. His path
of life was gauntlet of severed friend
ships and finished associations.
At last came the hour when he was to
be deserted by his mother.
The only difference between them was
Death.
Worn out with seeking to reach his
just ideal, separated from the little affec-
tons and weaknesses of life, forever in
her great taskmaster's eye" and that
taskmaster her own magistrate son, Mrs
Prim lay down to die, and he-a million
aire now, a censor and hector in every
thing concerning his city, State and coun-
try, their ethics and their commerce, their
persiflage and their biography-was pro-
foundly lonely, profoundly bitter.
God, the unjust, had come to rob him,
Laban Prim, the ever-just. Let any man
dare to say the contraryl
But the sense of that pure essence of
derivation from two picked, selected
scions of absolute morality sustained
him even in this awful article of death.
He could be a Stole even now. To him
it seemed like the death of Seneca, or of
"Pembroke's mother" that the Fates had
come to take the life of the mother of
Laban Prim! He knew they were mex
orable, but they must at least feel that he
and his descent were as proud and severe
as they.
"My son." the mother one day said, 81
would like to see my sister, from the
country of my childhood. She has been
all her life very poor and illiterate.
have not seen her since l married your
father and he would not let me visit her
any more. 1t lies upon my heart that l
have neglected her"
'Mother you have son, is that not
enough?'
Eyes, praised be Je- I mean Epictetus,
Laban! But when you come to die the
things and faces of childhood will make
a playground of the brain. In my delir-
ium | do not see your father or even
you, my noble son, but only my poor sis
tiers and the mountain people again. May
see her, Laban, my last sister?'
Laban asked his grandmother what
to do-his fathers mother-in such an
extraordinary situation.
DOR exclaimed this very aged lady,
herself outlived her generation and all
her consumptive children. "Why, obey
dying wish!'
The poor woman came all the way from
Middle Creek valley to the streams
which rise in the great White Hills. She
never thought the world had so many
miles in it as she had journeyed, nor half
as many people. Her leaving home had
been attended by as much excitement as
an auction sale or a bunker love-feast
She came consigned like Jersey COW, by
express, with label sewed to her calico
hood:
"This Feemail can't reed Tel her
which Kyars to git on fur Bozstoun, Mas.
U. S. of Amareca"
She arrived nearly dumb with appre-
hension, incapable of uttering any con-
nected part of sentence, till she saw her
sister on the bed of death, and when they
came together with tears and joy, both,
by some relapse of self-respect, used the
same words in the same instant:
"Why, you ole thing"
After that his mother seemed to need
Laban Prim less than he had ever known.
She would lie on the brink of eternity
hearing this illiterate sister run on about
things neither of profit nor of rele-
vancy-about the White Rocks, and the
last picnic at the Kettles, the killing of
one more wildcat in Braddock's Gap, the
wedding in Rohrersville and the new
priest at The Trap.
Laban's mother would listen, with her
soul between that silly tongue and the
PARKWAY bells of the future world, and
ask in the lapses of silence about the
laurel bushes in blossom and the taste of
the mountain blackberries.
Not one word about the intellectual
man who came from New Hampshire to
touch into a celestial spirit the former
equal of the prating sister!
And this sister would sit and look
without speaking-like a wild COW, all
eyes and wonder-at Laban Prim, with
his million of dollars.
She never called him "You ole thing"
Grandmother drew near Laban now
Grandmother Prim, usually cold and dis
tant. Now she seemed to feel for him,
saying:
'Laban, your friend is going your last
friend"
He drew mighty sob, but leaned on
the calm friendship of Zeno, the Stole,
who died three hundred years before
Jesus, and Laban said aloud:
1.-THE passions, which are not rational
impulses, must be extirpated, and grief is
one of them. Mother will die without
religious excitement"
She did. She wandered in her mind,
and one day said:
81 hear the cow-bells up in Champions
Gap. Jing- a-ling! Jing -a-lingl It's
milking time and sun is setting; sonny,
drive 'em homer
There was no other sound except the
gurgle of that wild old sisters sob, feeling
of the cold hands and feet and saying
broken heartedly:
"You ole thing"
In the midst of that night Laban Prim
saw a mysterious act.
AS he was lying in the next room,
motionless as if asleep, he looked through
the open door into the chamber of the
dead, and saw the old woman from the
MARYLAND mountain sides searching his
mothers clothing.
10 fol n Of a